City Slang

The Hitcher

Sean Bean is a placeholder actor — convincing only for as long as you can stand his sour facial expression, the look of a villain with an impacted tooth. But casting Bean as the titular thug is right for this DOA remake. The original, 1986 Hitcher wasn’t that great, either; C. Thomas Howell was the hero, and his career skidded over the median strip shortly after he played Ponyboy in 1983. But it did have that blue-eyed Dutch menace Rutger Hauer, and a suitably gloomy soundtrack from Mark Isham. The trumpeter and new-age pioneer builds soundscapes that resonate like warped sheet metal, drawing on his own Vapor Drawings as well as the synthesizer watercolors of Tangerine Dream for some nicely understated suspense. Unlike Sean Bean pretending he isn’t a bad guy.